The Patrol Blog is your online news source and help desk for BlogPatrol.com. We provide tips and instructions on using BlogPatrol, plus updates on enhancements and bug fixes. We also review blogging resources and blogs that pique our interest.

Monday, March 5, 2007

One thing we know for certain: the current system cannot handle simultaneously what everyone wants, which is:(1) recording your stats,(2) giving you access to your member login panel, and(3) giving you access to all of the stats reports.

As of February 22, we have been just (1) recording your stats. There is no access to (2) your member login panel or (3) your stats reports.

While not being able to give you access to your stats is frustrating, it is even worse to turn on the system fully only to have it crash every few minutes. We are, at the least, able to record hits for you so that when we do enable access to your stats, then the statistics will be up-to-date for you.

In summary, BlogPatrol is effectively closed for renovations. For instance, we are no longer accepting any new user signups. We are, however, working furiously to develop the new system, what we are calling BlogPatrol 2.0.

One of our priorities this week will be to see how the current system (BlogPatrol 1.0) responds when we turn on access to the user account control panel and just the "total visitor counts" and "total hit counts" (but not any of the reports.)

I want to reiterate that we have taken tangible steps to improve our system: hiring new talent, choosing a new server hosting provider, and making a decision on how to upgrade our server. I have also outlined the overall plan and estimated schedule (6 months) for implementing BlogPatrol 2.0. That's the good news.

The bad news? The aforementioned steps will take time to implement. Our new talent, no matter how good, needs time to learn a complex system. Our new hosting provider will take at least several weeks to provide us the machines that we have ordered. Once the machines arrive, it will take time to configure and test those machines before we can migrate BlogPatrol from our old server to our new ones.

Given our resources as a small company with part-time resources, this is the best we can do, and this is all we can do. We'll get there, but it's going to take time. I'm sorry, but there's just no way around these constraints if we're going to manage BlogPatrol correctly for you.

Thanks for your continued feedback everyone! I'm pleased to announce that we've re-enabled account logins (but stats reports are still off for now). That means we have 2 out of 3 functions now available for you: (1) recording your stats and (2) giving you access to your member login panel. Function (3), giving you access to all of the stats reports, will not be available for another few weeks (when our new servers arrive).